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Steaming Torsos

J. Hoberman

Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film by Lee Clark Mitchell
Chicago, 352 pp, £23.95, November 1996, ISBN 0 226 53234 8

From 1910 to the end of the Fifties, Westerns accounted for a quarter of all Hollywood productions. As late as 1972, the high point of genre revisionism, they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet Communism, by the panic which attended a Japanese firm’s bid to administer the services at Yellowstone National Park.

Like the designated ‘national pastime’ of baseball, the Western is a sacred part of America’s post-Civil War national mythology – a shared language, a unifying set of symbols and metaphors, and a paradigm of (mainly male) behaviour. But where baseball is all form, the Western is heavy on content. Essentially, as Philip French once observed, it is ‘America rewriting and reinterpreting her own past, however honestly or dishonestly’. As is the literary history of Westerns: Henry Nash Smith’s classic Virgin Land is redolent of New Deal optimism, Robert Warshow’s much anthologised essay ‘The Westerner’ is a précis of Cold War concerns, Leslie Fiedler’s Return of the Vanishing American rescripts the West in countercultural terms and Richard Slotkin’s vast Gunfighter Nation is haunted by Vietnam.

Lee Clark Mitchell’s elegantly written Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film includes among its introductory epigrams Henry Kissinger’s 1972 comparison of himself with the Lone Ranger but, as befits the uncertainties of America’s post-Communism role, his book has less to do with realpolitik than with the construction of gender. Mitchell, who chairs the Department of English at Princeton, traces the Western’s obsession with masculinity from James Fenimore Cooper through Owen Wister, Zane Grey and John Ford to Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah. His subject is the well-known tautology that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

For Mitchell, the Western novel is essentially theatrical – a stage on which male identity is enacted, as well as a form of cinema avant la lettre. He rightly considers Cooper’s heroic Indian-fighter Natty Bumppo, protagonist of The Last of the Mohicans – the most celebrated and popular American novel for a century after its publication in 1826 – to be the model of a political leader. Natty is a man of the people who is immune to the passions of the mob; he is on familiar terms with the wilderness and yet exercises moral restraint, even as he destroys his enemies. Each of the Leatherstocking novels, as Mitchell points out, also ‘raises the large question who possesses the American continent itself and how that possession is to be legitimised’. That ownership, of course, is achieved by obliterating the indigenous inhabitants in the cause of historical inevitability. A white man who has transformed himself into an Indian, who is unencumbered by family and yet remains the last, best hope for the settlers on the frontier, Natty is – as D.H. Lawrence put it in his Studies in Classic American Literature – an ‘isolate, almost selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure white’. (Taciturn and buckskin-clad, he is also the original American hipster; turgid though it is, The Last of the Mohicans represents the Birth of the Cool.)

Cooper’s use of the West as a stage set exerted a powerful influence on subsequent American painters; as Mitchell notes, it also anticipates Zane Grey’s high Utah plateaux and John Ford’s repeated use of Monument Valley – to which, looking ahead to the genre’s self-consciously florid sunset, one might add Sam Peckinpah’s ‘Mexico’ and Sergio Leone’s sensationally arid Leone-land. Although he glosses over the degree to which, a half-century before Hollywood, the weekly ‘dime novel’ and the Wild West Show pioneered by Buffalo Bill Cody had already produced a popular romance of the West, Mitchell does – in his most original chapter – bracket the painter Albert Bierstadt with the writer Bret Harte, two popular iconographers of the West, both of whom enjoyed a meteoric rise and suffered a subsequent fall in the decade following the Civil War. Neither is remotely canonical.

Letters

In his examination of the decline of the Western, J. Hoberman (LRB, 6 February) argues that one cause was the impossibility of Arnold Schwarzenegger appearing in this form of film. Alas, in 1979 he graced The Villain alongside a scowling Kirk Douglas. It did little business, despite being re-titled for release here as Cactus Jack. Arnold, in an early role, plays a character called Handsome Stranger and looks retching in powder-blue buckskin.

J. Hoberman completely missed the point in his piece about Westerns (LRB, 6 February). A morality play expressing the founding values of the United States, the classic American Western was popular during the era of unbounded American nationalism – from the turn of the century until the Seventies. It fell into disuse during the debate over the Vietnam War, but has roared back in the form of outer space adventures where valiant heroes time-warp about the universe upholding truth, democracy and apple pie. Star Trek (1966-8), like Shane (1953), exemplifies America’s self-image as a virtuous people who correct the problems of the world and then disappear without interfering in an alien culture. It’s little wonder the original Star Trek was created during the Vietnam War, or that it disappeared so quickly as the war worsened for the US – another victim of the Tet Offensive. Once the war was no longer a day-to-day threat, a squadron of space Westerns came back at warp speed.

What was the American Revolution? As described in myth, 13 tiny colonies challenged the world’s mightiest empire, its Darth Vader evil leader and its hired guns in a shoot-out at the OK Corral (Lexington – the shot heard round the world). Eventually they overthrew King George Three Sticks, even though the basic concept of English liberty is the ‘father’ of all the American ideals of freedom and democracy. Hoberman overlooked the truths of mythology. The American Government still seizes arms caches, as at Waco, Texas; the English weren’t doing anything unusual when they marched to disarm a mob of armed farmers at Concord. The Continental Army lost 19 of its 21 major engagements; even at Yorktown, American forces were outnumbered by the French, while the original English plan to evacuate their troops was blocked by a French fleet. Yet a myth was created about a few stalwart patriots who won the Continental Army’s victory against the overwhelming power of England. Likewise, Star Wars gunfighters outshoot any number of bad guys, often with barely a scratch themselves. During the American Revolution, England was also at war with France, Spain, Holland and Denmark. This was a rare occasion when the English did not have a strong Continental ally. A key battle of the American Revolution was an otherwise obscure English-French naval engagement off India; the French victory prevented the English from countering massive French naval aid to the rebellious colonists. When the Revolutionary War ended, the Continental Army was largely disbanded as soldiers returned to their homes and ploughs. Strong and silent, the Western hero likewise leaves when the shooting stops.

When you live in the West for a while, you understand the local definition of a rancher as ‘a person who would steal a hot stove, then come back for the smoke’.

Although Ted Rushton (Letters, 20 March) follows logic in identifying ‘the shot heard round the world’ with the Battle of Lexington, where the first shot of the American Revolution was indeed fired, the quotation is from Emerson’s ‘Concord Hymn’, which begins: ‘By the rude bridge which arched the flood’. Lexington Common boasts neither bridge nor river, whereas the bridge (or a restoration of it) remains in Concord as a tourist attraction. The same error occurs in Roy Jenkins’s biography of Gladstone, which unaccountably refers to it as the ‘rood bridge’.